A Tibetan man has set himself on fire in western China in what appears to be the latest such radical protest against Beijing’s rule, a US government-backed radio station and a rights monitoring group report.

The unidentified man set himself alight on a road outside the town of Machu in a traditionally Tibetan area of Gansu province at around 7pm on Thursday, Radio Free Asia and London-based Free Tibet reported.

[…] Thursday’s self-immolation was the first known to have occurred since either March or May. [Source]

Tashi Rabten, 33, set himself ablaze on Dec. 8 at about 7:00 p.m. local time on a road leading from the Machu (in Chinese, Maqu) county center to the Machu Bridge, local sources said following the protest.

[…] Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Tibetan living in the area told RFA on Friday that witnesses to the protest heard Rabten “call out for freedom for Tibet and for the return of [exiled spiritual leader] the Dalai Lama.”

“He also called out for the release of the [detained] Panchen Lama, Gendun Choekyi Nyima,” RFA’s source said.

[…] “[Police dispatched to Rabten’s home] demanded that his family should say that the self-immolation had no connection with Chinese government policies, and had been carried out instead because of problems at home,” the source said.

Rabten’s wife and a 15-year-old daughter were then taken away by police, he said. [Source]

“Having lost a father and a husband, Tashi Rabten’s family now find themselves in detention. The cruelty of this system knows no bounds. The only crime they have committed is to be the family of someone who has embarrassed China by once again reminding the world that their occupation and these human rights abuses cause Tibetans real pain. And sometimes this pain pushes Tibetans to make the ultimate sacrifice.”

“Instead of trying to bury this news or blaming and punishing the family, China should tackle the root causes of these self-immolations. It should remove its suffocating restrictions on Tibet, end the human rights violations it carries out on a daily basis and put an end to the systematic eradication of Tibet’s culture. The international community must also join this effort by calling on China to halt these abuses. World leaders cannot simply stand by while more Tibetan lives are lost.”[Source]

Also on Twitter, Tibet scholar Robert Barnett said: “Another tragic self-immolation by a Tibetan in support of the Dalai Lama, who needs to ask Tibetans not to do this.” The Dalai Lama has been consistently reticent on Tibetan self-immolations, saying in 2012: “This is a very, very delicate political issue. Now, the reality is that if I say something positive, then the Chinese immediately blame me. If I say something negative, then the family members of those people feel very sad.”

DonEvansWm: #China A game submitted for approval was sent back 13 times. The reasons for rejection included: male characters cannot have bare nipples; the characters for “robbery” or “death” may not appear; please make the health advisory screen look a bit better, etc. 9, 10, 11 … China’s repressive regulatory #FreedomofSpeech

My game has been under inspection since the middle of May. Right at the beginning, we removed all female nudity, reduced the amount of English, revised the vocabulary, and made all the usual superficial preparations. Then we beat down each of their required fixes, one by one:

Revision 5: “There’s a problem with the way banned keyboards are dealt with.” Also our list of forbidden vocabulary has expanded

Revision 6: “Please make the health advisory screen look a bit better.” Also our list of forbidden vocabulary has expanded

Revision 7: “Please put the health advisory screen on an individual page.” Also our list of forbidden vocabulary has expanded

Revision 8: “Please put the health advisory screen at the very start of the game.” Also our list of forbidden vocabulary has expanded

Revision 9: Our list of forbidden vocabulary has expanded

Revision 10: Our list of forbidden vocabulary has expanded

Revision 11: Our list of forbidden vocabulary has expanded

Revision 12: “We have yet again expanded your list of forbidden vocabulary. We also hope you can change your method for dealing with them: we hope you can not only screen and remove whole words, but also the characters in them. With moúshā (谋杀, “murder”), for example, it’s not just moúshā that can’t be used, but also the two individual characters moú and shā ….” Of course, in the end we rejected this requirement, but only after analyzing it at great length.

Shizisang (@十字桑): I can’t believe it, our company’s game didn’t pass inspection because it uses English in a few places. Like “mission start/complete”; when the “boss” appears, it says “warning” … Fucking State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, [if you hate English that much] why don’t you go after the fucking Ministry of Education? … and on top of that, we submitted the game in March, so it took them four damned months to give us the results ………

Shizisang (@十字桑): After changing the resources that should have been in English into Chinese, I felt kind of bewildered. For example, where it should have said “GO,” it said “前进” [“advance”] … it was really kind of funny. Although my strong suggestion to replace “YOU LOSE” with “你完蛋了” [“You’re Done”] was vetoed by the others. Hmmmph. [Chinese]

tinyfool (@tinyfool): Even IT professionals must face the idiotic SAPPRFT now

Shasila (@傻斯拉): Hahaha, I guess this is your first time submitting a game for inspection? I remember doing it, it was like eating dogshit

WojiuxianganqingdegaigemingziQwQ (@我就想安静的改个名字QwQ): Hahahahaha, I’ve already changed all the English UI elements in our game

firemeV (@firemeV): Time for braindead talking points like “this is the best of times, this is the worst of times,” “we’ve already made so much progress from the past,” “if there were no inspections, more and more young people would be destroyed by gaming,” “the government department does these strict inspections for your own good”

TechnoCore (@TechnoCore): I don’t understand your country. The IT sector is a bright spot in a general economic slump, and you’re still trying to choke it. With all these lay-offs, video games are the cheapest entertainment option [for the unemployed]: objectively speaking, how big an effect does this have in maintaining stability? And you’re still trying to kill it？I don’t understand your country.

Yingge (@硬哥): This reminds me of when we had to call the NBA the “American National Basketball Association Male Professional League” ….

Jingshangongyuan51qu (@景山公园51区): Creative industries are to be strictly examined without question—there’s no need for a game to be published unless it reflects the Party’s greatness, glory, and correctness

MulailuntaiwangAMADEUS (@牧濑伦太郎AMADEUS): SAPPRFT is like: “‘Warning’? I don’t understand this, is it a swear word? ‘Mission Complete’? I guess this means opposing the Party and society? Anyway, foreign things are bad”

WuliGenos (@WuliGenos): Hahaha, our game has an “X”

_Tianqu (@_天驱): One month to make a game and three months in inspection is crazy [Chinese]

Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordinated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and the transition team to set up a series of meetings between Mr. Trump’s advisers and officials in Taiwan, according to disclosure documents filed last week with the Justice Department. Mr. Dole also assisted in successful efforts by Taiwan to include language favorable to it in the Republican Party platform, according to the documents.

[…] “They’re very optimistic,” Mr. Dole said of the Taiwanese in an interview on Tuesday. “They see a new president, a Republican, and they’d like to develop a closer relationship.”

[…] The disclosure documents were submitted before the call took place and made no mention of it. But Mr. Dole, 93, a former Senate majority leader from Kansas, said he had worked with transition officials to facilitate the conversation.

“It’s fair to say that we had some influence,” he said. “When you represent a client and they make requests, you’re supposed to respond.” [Source]

Taiwan paid the 93-year-old Dole and his law firm, Alston & Bird, $140,000 between May and October, according to the new disclosure. His spokeswoman declined to comment.

[…] “It does seem very strange that Trump is ignoring the State Department while apparently allowing Bob Dole, a lobbyist for Taiwan, to make arrangements for him in what appears to be a change in U.S. policy dealing with Taiwan,” said Fred Wertheimer, the founder and president of watchdog group Democracy 21. “Dole’s interests here certainly involved Taiwan’s interests more than it did American interests, and the fact that he was the intermediary raises a serious issue about just how President-elect Trump is going to make U.S. foreign policy.”

Dole’s work is part of Taiwan’s decades-long investment in grooming conservatives to bolster its U.S. relations at China’s expense, dispatching lobbyists to ply Capitol Hill, feting congressional staff with trips to Taipei, throwing parties at a vast D.C. estate, and funneling money to China hawks at right-leaning think tanks.

[…] The filing also reveals Dole’s hand in making the Republican platform the most pro-Taiwan it has ever been. The 2016 edition added language affirming the “Six Assurances” that President Ronald Reagan made to Taiwan’s security in 1982. [Source]

Like many Americans who stand for progressive ideals, few young Taiwanese see someone like Donald Trump as a decent leader. However, the anxious reaction of the American media and foreign policy establishment to the Dec. 2 phone call between Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen and President-elect Trump is also at odds with American values of human rights, freedom and democracy.

Sharing these values, we are puzzled why many commentators have treated Trump’s move as an “affront” to authoritarian China rather than consider the possibility of normalizing relations with a democratic nation of 23 million people, many of whom share deep affinities with the United States. When it comes to human rights in Tibet, freedom of speech in Hong Kong or maintaining strong relations with Japan or the Philippines, U.S. pundits rarely skirt controversy for fear of “provoking” China. Why should the rhetoric change when it comes to Taiwan — a vibrant young democracy led by a female head of state which boasts universal health care and is poised to become the first place in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage?

Taiwan’s current diplomatic isolation is a legacy of the Cold War. When the Carter administration cut official ties with Taiwan in 1979, the island was still under the rule of an exiled authoritarian regime which claimed itself as the legitimate representative of all of China. Taiwan’s uneven support from American conservatives, who saw Taiwan as a front line against communist China, is partly a result of this history. However, times have changed. Taiwan has democratized and its people are articulating new aspirations which deserve acknowledgment from Americans across the political spectrum. […] [Source]

China should “build more strategic nuclear arms and accelerate the deployment of the DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile” to protect its interests, should Trump attempt to corner the country in an “unacceptable way”, it said.

“China’s military spending in 2017 should be augmented significantly,” it added in the editorial that appeared in both its English and Chinese editions.

In the editorial, the Global Times said: “We need to get better prepared militarily regarding the Taiwan question to ensure that those who advocate Taiwan’s independence will be punished, and take precautions in case of US provocations in the South China Sea.”

[…] On Wednesday, Trump selected Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, who has close ties to Chinese President Xi Jinping dating back to the mid-1980s, as ambassador to China – potentially welcome news for Beijing, which called him an “old friend” upon receiving reports of his nomination.

Nevertheless, the state-owned English-language China Daily newspaper remained pessimistic about the future of relations with the US. [Source]

No matter what Trump thinks, China must be determined to upset his unreasonable requests at his early time in office, and fight back if his moves harm China’s interests, regardless of the consequences to the dynamics of the Sino-US relationship. What Trump likes most is the manufacturing of conflict, amid which he wins both the limelight and benefits to his interests. If China behaves soft-heartedly for the greater good of the bilateral ties, it will only embolden Trump to be more aggressive.

No matter who is in the White House, the strategic confrontation between the U.S. and China is obviously getting worse, which is inconsistent with the interests of American society as a whole. So it is safe to say, Trump’s China-bashing tweet is just a cover for his real intent, which is to treat China as a fat lamb and cut a piece of meat off it. Trump wants to revive US economy, but he knows that the Americans have already become lazy, that his country is not as competitive as it used to be. He is trying to pillage other countries for the prosperity of the U.S.

Trump seems to be wanting to make the US a new economic empire in the 21st century under his leadership, which is about to smash the current world economic order‘s “Great Mongol Khan, whatever you want you can obtain. His thinking is too simple. He doesn’t know that the U.S. is the biggest beneficiary in the current world order, and feeling that the U.S. got too little he wants to reshape the world order into a winner-takes-all one.

China should brace itself for possible fluctuations in the Sino-U.S. relationship after Trump is sworn in next January 20. We must confront Trump’s provocations head-on, and make sure he won’t take advantage of China at the beginning of his tenure, setting the stage for China to deal with the future strategies of the new master of the White House. Only after victory in this initial battle will there be a foundation for further China-U.S. negotiations. With anti-Trump voices sounding loudly in the U.S., Chinese society must meet this conflict with much greater unity than his side. We can sustain through any difficulty, but he may not be able to. [Chinese]

]]>198140Phrase of the Week: Old Friend of the Chinese Peoplehttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/12/phrase-week-old-friend-chinese-people/
Thu, 08 Dec 2016 21:16:27 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=198135The Word of the Week comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China’s online “resistance discourse,” used to mock and subvert the official language around censorship and political correctness.

Mourning an old friend: photoshopped image from the time of Mao’s death. (Artist: Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒)

Official parlance for world leaders who have visited China or shown their support for the country. The “friends” most discussed by netizens include the late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, former Iraqi president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The honorary descriptor was first bestowed on Canadian James G. Endicott in 1956 for his support of the revolution. Early on, “old friends of the Chinese people” were ideological supporters, but as China’s foreign policy has become more pragmatic and market-driven, the phrase has been used to describe trade partners and leaders of international organizations.

China also occasionally describes its relations with other countries in terms of friendships, referring to Pakistan as an “all-weather friend.”

Example:

Laozitanyue (@老子叹曰): Could the qualifications of Mubarak, an old friend of the Chinese people, be outdated? Befitting the high-flying international badass class? In the age of the Internet, for reasons everyone knows… the poor sap had no choice but to step down. Let this be a lesson! (October 3, 2014)

Can’t get enough of subversive Chinese netspeak? Check out our latest ebook, “Decoding the Chinese Internet: A Glossary of Political Slang.” Includes dozens of new terms and classic catchphrases, presented in a new, image-rich format. Available for pay-what-you-want (including nothing). All proceeds support CDT.

Mr. Jiang Tianyong has represented clients in a number of high-profile cases in China, including clients that carried HIV, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetan protesters and victims of the 2008 milk scandal, as well as well-known rights defenders.

“We cannot rule out the possibility that Mr. Jiang may have been disappeared by the State agents because of his human rights work,” the UN experts noted. “Over the past years, we have received information that Mr. Jiang has been arrested, detained, and beaten by the police and state security officers on multiple occasions as a result of his human rights work.”

“Combined with the reports of hundreds of human rights defenders in China that have been harassed, arrested, criminally charged, detained, or gone missing since the ‘709 crackdown’ in July 2015, we fear that Mr. Jiang’s disappearance may be directly linked to his advocacy and he may be at risk of torture,” they said.

[…] The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, who met with Mr. Jiang in August during his visit to China, said he was deeply concerned that Mr. Jiang’s disappearance may have occurred, at least in part, in reprisal for his cooperation with the UN during his visit to China.

“The international standards are clear: States must refrain from and protect all persons from acts of reprisal,” Mr. Alston said, noting that that other individuals he met during his visit to China have also been harassed and subjected to what appears to be reprisals. [Source]

Jiang is just the latest victim in Beijing’s terror campaign against the human rights community, which has seen the disappearance of countless individuals into a shadowy network of secret detention. Over the last decade, China has worked to normalize enforced disappearances behind a veneer of the rule of law.

[…] Although Article 37 [of the Criminal Procedure Law] guarantees the right to promptly meet with a lawyer, it also states that in national security cases this right may be revoked at the discretion of the police — a transparent exception considering RSDL is specifically designed for national security cases, among others. This is particularly troubling due to the conflation of national security crimes with human rights defense, apparent in the use of national security charges within the “709 Crackdown” on human rights lawyers beginning in July 2015. This trend is certain to continue unless the National Security Law is amended or repealed.

[…] China must clarify its definition and use of national security crimes. The extreme vagueness in the law allows for the State to claim anything it wants. This is doubly concerning when such allegations are part of manipulated legislation that attempts to legalize human rights violations on national security grounds. Again, international law is clear that there are no exceptions when it comes to enforced disappearances. [Source]

China’s crackdown on lawyers and human rights defenders is not a single event but a rolling onslaught. Last month, three prominent rights activists were detained by police in separate provinces. What makes these detentions so pernicious is that China’s security apparatus has targeted the backbone of the rights movement: lawyers and defenders who represent the accused. The latest detentions are part of President Xi Jinping’s broader campaign to snuff out opposition to the ruling party-state wherever it can be found.

[…] Every effort must be made to speak up for those who are hustled away in the middle of the night. President-elect Donald Trump has shown little interest in human rights, but after he takes office he should not remain silent about these cases, because silence only encourages more repression. [Source]

Corruption, by definition, involves acting without regard for the rule of law. Chinese government efforts to combat corruption are unlikely to succeed so long as the rule of law is flouted throughout China’s justice system. Undoing pervasive corruption will require freeing the judicial system from Communist Party control, ending impunity for senior officials, and implementing genuine legal reforms. [Source]

“President Xi has built his anti-corruption campaign on an abusive and illegal detention system,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. “Torturing suspects to confess won’t bring an end to corruption, but will end any confidence in China’s judicial system.”

The report is based on 21 Human Rights Watch interviews with four former shuanggui detainees, as well as family members of detainees; 35 detailed accounts from detainees culled from over 200 Chinese media reports; and an analysis of 38 court verdicts from across the country. While there have been commentaries and analyses on the shuanggui system, the Human Rights Watch report is the first to contain firsthand accounts from detainees, as well as drawing on a wide variety of secondary, official sources.

[…] While President Xi has characterized the fight against corruption as a “matter of life and death” for the Communist Party, the same is true for shuanggui detainees: there have been at least 11 deaths in shuanggui custody reported by the media since 2010. In most cases, authorities claimed these were suicides, but family members often suspected mistreatment, and the lack of comprehensive, impartial investigations into these deaths deepens these suspicions. While former detainees reported that the harsh conditions in shuanggui prompted suicidal thoughts, they also said the constant surveillance and the room’s modifications, designed to prevent suicide attempts, made it difficult to put such thoughts into action.

Mr. Xi has made fighting corruption a centerpiece of his administration, and televised shows of officials confessing to taking bribes have been popular. The state-run news media rarely airs criticisms of the detention system. Chinese officials have maintained that the anticorruption investigations are carried out humanely in safe sites and that torture and other abuses have been curtailed by stricter rules and oversight. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which oversees the local discipline offices, did not answer faxed questions about the report.

“There’s been tightening censorship such that it is even harder than before for the victims of shuanggui and their families to tell the public about abuses they suffered,” Maya Wang, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, said by email. But, she added, “China has a serious corruption problem, and the public supports a tough anticorruption campaign, particularly against government officials.” [Source]

Wang’s comments came at a time when the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and its local branches are under increased scrutiny, as their power to interrogate and detain is not guaranteed or regulated by law.

“Power without containment is dangerous,” Wang said during a trip to Jiangsu province that ended on Tuesday, CCTV reported. He said anti-graft authorities should videotape all interrogations, as well as clarify the rules on handling seized property.

The report on Wang came as a global rights group called on the mainland to stop holding party members without charge, releasing a report criticising the system on the unofficial four-year anniversary of the graft crackdown by President Xi Jinping. [Source]

]]>198085Trump, Taiwan, and China: a “Storm on the Horizon”http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/12/trump-taiwan-china-cloudy-storm-horizon/
Tue, 06 Dec 2016 08:07:47 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=198064When President-elect Trump spoke by phone to Tsai Ing-wen, referring to her as “the president of Taiwan,” he broke decades of protocol in the carefully scripted and crafted trilateral relationship between the U.S., Taiwan, and China. The immediate responses to the call were swift and varied, with many assuming the call–the highest public contact since the U.S. canceled diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favor of China in 1979–was the outcome of Trump’s political and diplomatic naiveté. Yet Trump’s advisors have since told the media that the call was long planned as part of a strategic move to realign the U.S.-China relationship, vis-à-vis Taiwan. Anne Gearan reports for The Washington Post:

The historic communication — the first between leaders of the United States and Taiwan since 1979 — was the product of months of quiet preparations and deliberations among Trump’s advisers about a new strategy for engagement with Taiwan that began even before he became the Republican presidential nominee, according to people involved in or briefed on the talks.

The call also reflects the views of hard-line advisers urging Trump to take a tough opening line with China, said others familiar with the months of discussion about Taiwan and China.

Trump and his advisers have sought to publicly portray the call the president-elect took from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen ­on Friday as a routine congratulatory call. Trump noted on Twitter that she placed the call.

[…] Tsai will have sympathetic ears in the White House. Priebus is reported to have visited Taiwan with a Republican delegation in 2011 and in October 2015, meeting Tsai before she was elected president. Taiwan Foreign Minister David Lee called him a friend of Taiwan and said his appointment as Trump’s chief of staff was “good news” for the island, according to local news media.

Nevertheless, some observers remained skeptical about the intention and timing of the call:

It’s possible that with Trump in the White House, Taiwan will play an even larger role in U.S. diplomacy. “Taiwan is about to become a more prominent feature of the overall U.S.-China relationship,” former U.S. ambassador to China and potential Trump secretary of state Jon Huntsman predicted in an interview with The New York Times on Saturday. Randy Schriver, a former deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs who now runs the Project 2049 Institute, a pro-Taiwanese think tank, is cautiously optimistic. “There has been a subtle struggle behind the scenes” to make Taiwan an issue in its own right, and not just “an issue within U.S.-China issues,” Schriver said. The U.S. government, he added, should not “always have to ask ‘Mother May I,’” to Beijing in regards to Taiwan. [Source]

A front-page editorial in the overseas edition of People’s Daily, the official organ of the Communist Party of China, denounced Mr. Trump for speaking Friday with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, warning that “creating troubles for the China-U.S. relationship is creating troubles for the U.S. itself.” The rebuke was much tougher than the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s initial response to the phone call, which broke with decades of American diplomatic practice.

For his part, Mr. Trump seemed to take umbrage at the idea that he needed China’s approval to speak with Ms. Tsai. In two posts on Twitter, he wrote: “Did China ask us if it was O.K. to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!”

[…] By going after China’s policies on trade and security, Mr. Trump appeared to be confirming his intent to take a tougher line with the Chinese leadership across a broader range of issues — and further dampened hopes in Beijing that he might step back from the campaign rhetoric he has used, including threats of punishing trade tariffs.

[…] That could put President Xi Jinping in a difficult position, forced to choose between playing down Mr. Trump’s attacks and risking a backlash at home, or raising the stakes by pushing back more forcefully and setting China on a potential collision course with the United States, its most important trading partner. [Source]

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said senior National Security Council officials spoke twice with Chinese officials over the weekend to reassure them of Washington’s commitment to the “One China” policy and to “reiterate and clarify the continued commitment of the United States to our longstanding China policy.”

The policy has been in place for 40 years and is focused on promoting and preserving peace and stability in the strait separating China and Taiwan, which is in U.S. interests, Earnest said.

“If the president-elect’s team has a different aim, I’ll leave it to them to describe,” he said. [Source]

While the phone call to Tsai may have been a deliberately provocative move planned by Trump’s advisors to signal a shift in attitudes toward China, it is still unclear what role if any Trump played in the planning. At the New Yorker, Evan Osnos writes that, with the call, Trump “may have been manipulated into doing something he doesn’t understand”:

When news broke of Trump’s phone call with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, foreign-policy experts were, unsurprisingly, appalled. Since his election, Trump has conducted a series of phone calls with foreign leaders, without seeking expertise from those at the State Department and the National Security Council who monitor the details of those relationships. On Wednesday, he told Pakistan’s President that he would do whatever he could to help him—despite America’s strong interest in preventing Pakistan from doing many things it would like to do in India and Afghanistan. To use an analogy that Trump would recognize, it’s akin to arriving for a negotiation without first asking the value of the assets, the cost of the transaction, or the previous terms of engagement.

[…] Whether it says it or not, China will regard this as a deeply destabilizing event not because the call materially changes U.S. support for Taiwan—it does not—but because it reveals the incoming Presidency to be volatile and unpredictable. In that sense, the Taiwan call is the latest indicator that Trump the President will be largely indistinguishable from Trump the candidate.

Trump has also shown himself to be highly exploitable on subjects that he does not grasp. He is surrounding himself with ideologically committed advisers who will seek to use those opportunities when they can. We should expect similar moments of exploitation to come on issues that Trump will regard as esoteric, such as the Middle East, health care, immigration, and entitlements. [Source]

“It is still too early to make any assured predictions but I think maybe I can see that a cloudy storm is gathering on the horizon,” Shi [Yinhong, a Renmin University foreign policy expert] said. “This is not good, of course.”

Referring to the billionaire’s latest social media salvo against Beijing, Shi said: “These words should again remind the Chinese media and a large part of Chinese international scholars and even maybe many officials within the Chinese government that their previous estimates of Trump’s disposition and his China policy are too optimistic.” [Source]

While it’s understandable that Trump is trying to deliver a message that, whatever he does, he doesn’t need to inform China or care about what Beijing likes, he is neglecting the possible ramifications of his actions and words on Sino-US relations, analysts said.

[…] Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said Trump’s tweets reflected his bellicose personality and intolerance of criticism from the Democrats, the White House and China, even though the Chinese government has been largely restrained since he was elected.

“Trump is still not yet in office yet, so the Chinese government can’t react too much to him, but China can take certain action against Taiwan,” Jin said. [Source]

Together, Trump’s shenanigans and the hyperventilation by the media could end up adding more unwarranted pressure on democratic Taiwan and could contribute to the continued narrowing of its international space.

This is a shame because Taiwan has come a long way from its days as the unsinkable aircraft carrier against Maoist-style communism. It’s now a full-fledged democracy, led by President Tsai Ing-wen, the only woman who is not part of a political dynasty to ever be elected as the leader of an Asian nation. Her victory this year marked the third peaceful transfer of power from one party to the other in Taiwan, a sign of the maturity of Taiwan’s political system, its robust civil society and raucously independent media.

[…] I worry that Trump’s call and the media reaction could complicate these warming ties by encouraging China to punish Taiwan, which could then touch off a cascading series of moves and counter-moves leading to more tension in Asia and, in the end, more problems for the people of Taiwan, China and the United States. Nobody really wants to replay 1996, when the Clinton administration dispatched two aircraft-carrier battle groups near Taiwan to put China on notice that a series of mock invasions and missile tests were out of line. I also worry that the new administration, seeking a breakthrough in North Korea, is reopening the Taiwan issue only to get Beijing’s attention and will drop the Taiwan bargaining chip once China gets the message. [Source]

The trouble, said some, is that Mr. Trump needlessly antagonized China by trumpeting the phone call and then following it up with a series of defiant tweets. “It’s not the phone call that’s the problem; it’s the making it public that’s the problem,” said Shelley Rigger, a professor of political science at Davidson College who specializes in Taiwan.

That could put President Xi Jinping in a difficult position, forced to choose between playing down Mr. Trump’s attacks and risking a backlash at home, or raising the stakes by pushing back more forcefully and setting China on a potential collision course with the United States.

The Chinese government’s initial reaction to Mr. Trump’s call has already drawn a torrent of criticism on social media from Chinese who complained that it was not tough enough. The statement from the foreign minister, Wang Yi, which was relatively low key, given the unprecedented nature of the call, refrained from criticizing Mr. Trump, instead accusing Taiwan of playing a “little trick” on the president-elect.

That offered Mr. Trump a face-saving way out of the imbroglio, and a chance to de-escalate. But the messages he posted on Twitter late Sunday stepped up the pressure on China’s leaders instead. [Source]

As James Palmer writes for Foreign Policy, the carefully constructed protocol concerning Taiwan serves many purposes, including the ability to hold nationalistic Chinese at bay when the topic comes up in the international arena:

The fussy diplomatic protocols Trump flouted, in this case, are not a mere formality. They are a finely honed coping strategy for Chinese emotions that are very raw and potentially explosive. Although the Chinese reaction has been surprisingly — perhaps hopefully — muted, there is no more sincerely sensitive issue in China, among politicians and the public, than Taiwan.

[…] And there’s the real problem. This isn’t just a set of political restrictions imposed by a paranoid party — one that has always been obsessed with controlling and contorting language. It’s bone deep in mainland Chinese, a conviction drummed into them by childhood and constantly reasserted. Plenty of elements of party propaganda are inconsequential to most Chinese or even mocked. Taiwan isn’t one of them.

I have lived in China for 13 years, and in that time I have talked with perhaps three mainlanders who thought that Taiwan had the right to determine its own future. Everyone else with whom I’ve discussed the issue, from ardent liberals to hardcore Marxists to the politically apathetic, has been fervently against the idea that Taiwan could ever be considered a country. It’s an idea as weird, taboo, and offensive to the majority of Chinese as proposing the restitution of slavery would be to Americans — not for its moral value but for going against everything they hold dear about their country.

In Taiwan, meanwhile, many people are celebrating the phone call as a long-overdue acknowledgement of their existence, while others fear potential repercussions. From Chris Horton at The New York Times:

“I think that for the majority of Taiwanese people, this is the happiest thing that’s happened to us since 1978, before the U.S. broke off diplomatic relations,” Hsieh Jin-ho, a publisher and commentator, said in a phone interview.

[…] Mr. Hsieh added that in general, Taiwanese had two different takeaways from the call.

“One conclusion is that Taiwan needs to seize this opportunity in order to upgrade to fuller relations with the U.S. and expand its international friendly relations,” he said. “Another group of people fear that China’s continually increasing pressure will grow even larger” and threaten Taiwan’s future. [Source]

In 1959, following the outbreak of an anti-Chinese rebellion in Tibet, the then 23-year-old Dalai Lama fled to India. Beijing never forgave him for leaving, nor forgave India for giving him refuge. Relations between Beijing and New Delhi, until then hailed as a shining example of peaceful coexistence, tanked. Border tensions escalated, and in October 1962, the two neighbors went to war in the Himalayas.

Although China won the battle, the real challenge was to persuade the world that the Indians were the bad guys — a matter complicated by the reality that Beijing attacked India, not the other way around. The task fell to the founding father of Chinese diplomacy, Zhou Enlai, who spent weeks explaining China’s take on the conflict to disconcerted regional players like Indonesia and Sri Lanka. In December 1962, Zhou attempted to convince the Mongolians to endorse the Chinese point of view. The records of his dramatic encounter with then Mongolian Prime Minister Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal have recently been declassified by the Mongolian Foreign Ministry, and are now accessible online. They make for sober reading.

Tsedenbal, who came to China to sign a border treaty and to ask for economic aid, seemed surprised when Zhou unexpectedly raised the subject of India. Zhou recounted the highlights of the Sino-Indian border confrontation, and condemned the Indians for selling out to U.S. imperialism and for pursuing anti-Chinese policies. Tsedenbal reacted by saying meekly that he was sorry that China and India had quarreled. “I don’t understand what you mean by being sorry about the Sino-Indian conflict,” Zhou pressed. It was a matter of black and white: China was right, India was wrong. There could not be neutrality in the question. But Tsedenbal would not budge, telling Zhou that quarreling with India over an uninhibited strip of land in the Himalayas would only force the Indians to turn to the West, and that would not help China’s cause. Zhou nearly lost it: his face “twisted in anger,” noted the record-taker. […] [Source]

Zanabazar was the first of eight patriarchs officially recognized by the Qing Court as the ecclesiastical leaders of northern Mongolia. In their homeland, the patriarchs were the third most senior lamas after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. Zanabazar is remembered as both a distinguished polymath noted for his bronze artwork, religious texts, and scientific experiments as well as a shrewd political strategist who allied his clan’s interests with the rising Qing Empire. After Zanabazar’s death in 1723, the Second Patriarch was found in northern Mongolia in the person of the one of the great-grandsons of Zanabazar’s brother and duly enthroned with the support of the Manchu throne and the Yellow Hat clergy in Lhasa.

[…] Despite the official line of the Communist authorities, the lineage did not die out. In 1936, the Reting Rinpoche, the ruling regent of Tibet for the interregnum between the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dalai Lamas, recognized a boy named Jambal Namdo Choiji in Lhasa as the reincarnation of the Eighth Patriarch. The boy’s identity remained a carefully guarded secret because of possible assassination attempts by Communist Mongolian agents. Jambal Namdo was inducted incognito into Lhasa’s clergy without the financial support usually provided to important tulkus. In the 1940s, he left the clergy, started a family, and earned his living peacefully as a farmer. However, in the aftermath of the Tibetan Uprising in 1959, he fled to India with the Dalai Lama because of his fear of being discovered and used as a propaganda tool by the Chinese Communists. In the 1980s, he resumed his monastic vows and lived a quiet life in Karnataka.

[…] Toward the end of his life, the Ninth Patriarch told the Dalai Lama of his desire to return to Mongolia for his passing. In November 2011, the Ninth Patriarch, in poor health, took up residency at the Gandan Tegchenling Monastery. He died there in March 2012.

According to Buddhist tradition, the Ninth Patriarch’s wish to pass away in Mongolia was a significant indication that his next rebirth would be in Mongolia. By spending his last days at the Gandan Tegchenling Monastery, the Ninth Patriarch helped to set the stage for the discovery of the first Mongolian-born patriarch in nearly 300 years. […] [Source]

Two years ago, cutting emissions looked easier for Beijing to achieve. China’s electricity consumption was stalling, and many coal-fired power plants began operating only half the time. But state-owned coal mining enterprises, flush with loans from state-owned banks, kept building more mines, leading to losses and dropping coal prices.

China began closing smaller, privately owned mines, cutting production while clamping down on some of the places that have made Chinese coal mining so dangerous. Just last summer, economic planners told mines they were not allowed to operate more than 276 days a year.

But developments were coming together to push prices up. Chinese investors piled into Chinese commodities markets, betting prices would rise. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as more speculators rushed in and bought more coal when prices rose.

An unusually hot summer and early autumn added to power demand. China’s banking regulators decided to let banks release a flood of mortgages to home buyers to bolster economic growth. That produced strong demand for electricity from the steel and cement industries. [Source]

The rally in coal prices was largely the product of a government campaign to massively reduce mining capacity as part of efforts to reduce state over investment, underused factories and heavy corporate debt. Beijing wants to close 500 million tons of coal capacity in the five years to 2020—half of which the government said it had already forced through by the end of October.

The vigor of the campaign slashed the supply of thermal coal, doubling prices this year to 604 yuan ($88) a ton this week, 61% higher than the start of the year, according to an industry price index.

[…] Economic data indicate that by midyear, Beijing was calling for rejuvenating state investment to juice macroeconomic growth, which in turn relies on ramping up electricity output—largely fueled by coal.

As late as September, the National Development and Reform Commission—the approving authority for infrastructure and industrial projects—was urging coal mines to increase their output to meet a shortfall in supply. [Source]

Many of China’s giant state-owned coal mining firms are unviable and plagued by overcapacity, but the ruling Communist party is reluctant to turn off the financial taps and risk widespread unemployment, with its potential for anger and unrest.

As of July, China already had 895 gigawatt in coal-fired power stations – representing more than half its electricity generation – said the London-based Carbon Tracker Initiative, which argues for limiting carbon emissions using financial data.

The country was operating the coal units at less than half their capacity, the campaign group said on Monday, but “perversely” had another 205GW already under construction and plans for an additional 405GW.

At an estimated $800m per kW, that could cost $490bn in total, CTI said. [Source]